Solana Pivots Toward Wall Street Plumbing, but the Token Barely Feels It

Solana Foundation pushes tokenized US securities to widen global access, as institutional pilots grow but SOL demand stays muted.

The Solana Foundation has made a strategic bet that its blockchain's real value lies not in competing with retail trading apps, but in dismantling the structural walls that keep most of the world's investors out of US markets. Speaking at Token2049 in Singapore and in an interview with CNBC on Wednesday, Foundation President Lily Liu framed the mission bluntly: blockchains exist to give investors everywhere a path into American assets.

That pitch rests on a striking imbalance. Around 160 countries together account for only about 5 percent of global stock market capitalization, leaving investors outside the leading industrialized nations facing steep hurdles when they try to buy US equities. Tokenized representations of stocks and exchange-traded funds, Liu argues, could narrow that gap. She also expects the broader crypto market recovery to continue over the next twelve months, even as digital assets fight artificial intelligence for the same pool of investor capital.

On-chain activity tells the story

The shift toward institutional use is already visible in the network's numbers. Memecoin trading volume on Solana collapsed from nearly $260 billion in the first quarter of 2025 to roughly $57 billion, while spot volume in tokenized assets climbed from $33 million to $8 billion over the same stretch.

To serve that market, the Foundation built the plumbing. Alongside existing token standards, it released an open-source standard for atomic settlement that swaps assets and payment simultaneously, so a failure on one side halts the entire transaction. J.P. Morgan, the US banking giant, provided advisory input on securities settlement requirements but neither develops, operates, nor commercially uses the software. The standard requires both the security and the liquidity to be fully funded before settlement, since netting and partial transfers are not built into the protocol itself.

Wall Street tests the rails, quietly

Financial firms are moving real use cases onto the network even as the price signal stays muted. Fiserv went live with its digital-asset platform for financial institutions in early October, settling its first production transaction — the dollar-backed Roughrider Coin for the Bank of North Dakota — over Solana. More than 90 partner banks and credit unions can plug into the system, with VersaBank USA handling issuance and Fireblocks providing custody. BlackRock added its own weight in August, launching a tokenized money market fund whose share register is maintained in part on Solana.

The Foundation followed up on Tuesday by unveiling Solana DvP, the open-source program designed to settle securities and payment atomically within seconds. Rhodel D'Souza, who oversees digital assets in J.P. Morgan's Markets division, called open settlement standards necessary infrastructure for market participants — while the bank reiterated it has neither built nor runs the software.

Why the token doesn't capture the flow

Billions in institutional traffic do not automatically lift SOL, and the reason sits in how tokenized securities settle. Institutional playbooks typically use stablecoins such as USDC as the payment leg, while the asset itself moves as a separate token. SOL is tapped only to cover network fees — and those fees are deliberately tiny. The base fee is just 5,000 lamports, or 0.000005 SOL per transfer, with half burned and half routed to validators.

Against a circulating supply of roughly 588 million SOL and no hard cap, that fraction of a cent per transaction barely offsets the steady issuance of new units. For institutional adoption to drive the price fundamentally, daily transaction volume would need to reach levels many times the current baseline.

Production-grade adoption still out of reach

Significant operational barriers remain before the financial industry can integrate at scale. The DvP program passed security reviews by the analysis firm Cantina, which resolved all four medium-severity findings out of 21 total, yet a full production launch has not happened. No major bank has made a firm trading commitment to the system. The open-source code also lacks built-in privacy features, leaving transaction amounts visible to all participants on the public blockchain, and financial institutions must supply their own identity-verification interfaces and legal frameworks.

Until those standards take hold across the board, many initiatives will stay in pilot phases — earning the network credibility while generating little fresh demand for the underlying token.

Trading desks offered scant upside in the meantime, with profit-taking and outflows from crypto funds weighing on sentiment. Solana changed hands at $116.38 on Wednesday, down 3.6 percent on the day, roughly 50 percent below its 52-week high as the sector waits for broader institutional participation.